


Eloquence

by ShannonPhillips



Series: A Little Less Attitude and a Little More Altitude [6]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 04:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6940030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonPhillips/pseuds/ShannonPhillips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are disgusting jokes about Twi'lek girls told all across the galaxy. Hera's good at ignoring them. Kanan, not so much. (Set about five months post-Gorse.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eloquence

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: bigoted and misogynistic language

It’s nothing Hera hasn’t heard before. It’s not like she meets her contacts at genteel tea gardens. She meets them in seedy cantinas, dark little holes-in-the-wall, places where people don’t look each other in the eyes and don’t remember faces afterwards. For _their_ anonymity, not hers: even in an enveloping cloak, Hera doesn’t go unnoticed.

The human at the bar is talking to no one in particular, and pitching his voice loud enough to be sure that Hera can hear him. “Hey! What’s the difference between a blood-skeeter and a Twi’lek girl?”

Kanan gives her a sidelong glance. Hera keeps her face resolutely still. She knows the punchline before the man drawls it out: “A skeeter stops sucking when you slap her!”

Her contact’s in the back, a twitchy-looking Rodian named Plen Caver. He doesn’t exactly seem like the revolutionary type, but his intel has always checked out. Hera slides into a chair next to him. Kanan spins his chair around backwards before straddling it: someday she’s going to have to teach him how to sit down like an adult.

“Who’s this?” Plen demands, his eyes rolling back and forth between Hera and Kanan. “You always came alone before!”

“I’m the muscle,” Kanan says, in a growly tone that will _not_ put Plen at ease.

“He’s my partner,” Hera says reassuringly, and slides a credit chip across the table. “Same deal as last time, Plen?”

“Yeah, all right,” he mutters. “But this is the last download for a while. Security’s tightening up.”

He puts a datapad down on the table, and Hera picks it up just as the man at the bar slurs out: “What’s the difference between a Twi’lek girl and a ‘fresher? The ‘fresher don’t follow you around for three days after you use it!”

“All right,” Hera tells Plen, still keeping her voice calm and soothing. “I won’t try to contact you. You know how to get in touch with me if you’re able to pass along anything else.”

He gives a tight nod, his antenna quivering. Hera stands and tucks the datapad into her cloak. Kanan rises too, waiting for Hera to walk past him before he falls in behind her.

This time it’s a new voice at the bar that calls: “How do you make a tailhead come?”

“Who cares!” the first man roars, and there’s a ripple of laughter.

“Naw,” his buddy says, “you tell her it’s the next guy’s turn!”

Hera pushes open the door, glad to be leaving. The cool night air washes over her face, sweeping away the stale air and stink of the cantina. But behind her, Kanan hesitates in the threshold.

“Hey Hera,” he says. “Am I off the clock?”

She looks back, genuinely puzzled. “What?”

“Job’s done, right? You got what you came for. And you won’t have any trouble making it back to the _Ghost_ from here.”

“I…suppose?” she says slowly.

“Good. I’ll meet you back at the ship.” He ducks back into the cantina, and it’s really only sheer confusion that makes Hera stop the door with her foot. So she sees, through the crack, Kanan swagger back to the jokester at the bar.

“Hey,” he says, tapping his shoulder, “hi, sorry to interrupt, but I _really_ wanted to punch you in the face.” And in the next second he does exactly that—it’s an explosion of violence that actually freezes Hera in its swiftness, a tight brutal movement almost too fast for her eye to follow. There’s a sickening crunch as his fist connects, a spray of shocking red, and the man goes flying back against the bar: there are cries of alarm and anger all around. Hera flinches back and the door swings closed, but before it does she hears Kanan saying calmly to someone else: “Don’t go anywhere, you’re next.”

She backs up, deeply disconcerted. The kind of scene that Kanan’s instigating in there is pretty close to what she tries at all costs to avoid. (It isn’t the worst-case scenario. But it’s close, and could easily lead into one of the things she genuinely fears: the whole place turning on _her_.)

And yet…he’ll probably be okay. He’s done this a hundred times, right? He’s got both natural abilities and advanced training that nobody else in there can match. The _speed_ of his attack…she’s seen him in action many times before, and yet that was somehow more intimate and more awful.

She turns, and starts walking swiftly back to the _Ghost_. Kanan wasn’t wrong when he said there wouldn’t be trouble. It’s a short distance and the streets are well-lit and well-traveled. She pulls her hood up and fades into the crowd.

And after Chopper pulls up the entry ramp behind her, Hera spends about half an hour just pacing back and forth in the front cargo hold. It’s hard for her to pick apart the tangle of emotions in her gut: fear, impatience, anger, and…behind them, something tender and raw. Which she doesn’t want to look at too closely.

She’s starting to wonder if she should go back and look for him when Chopper whistles over the com. “Yes!” Hera snaps. “Let him in!”

The ramp slowly lowers. At the bottom, Kanan grins up at her: one eye nearly swollen shut, and blood caking the entire right side of his jaw. She very much hopes that most of it isn’t his.

“Captain,” he says amiably, as he boards.

Hera just narrows her eyes. “Was that for me?” she asks coldly.

“Nope,” Kanan says cheerfully. “One hundred percent for my own enjoyment.”

“Uh huh. And do you go in punching when anybody makes a crack about Mon Calamari genitals smelling like monkey? Or how about Sullustans and how hard it is to tell which end to fuck? Because frankly if you react like this whenever you hear a crude and bigoted slur, then I have a hard time seeing how you’ve ever gotten anything else done.” She’s had some time to practice this speech. She thinks it comes off rather well.

He runs the back of his arm across his face, smearing even more of the blood across his cheek. “Why are you asking me questions when you know you’re not gonna like the answers?” His voice is still lighthearted enough, but there’s some tension around his mouth.

She folds her arms. “Because when you _admit_ you’re doing this in a misguided attempt to defend my honor, then I can tell you to _stop_.”

“It’s not about your honor!” They’re both momentarily startled when the entry ramp clangs shut: Chopper has engaged the hydraulics. Then Kanan turns back to her, with a small, frustrated motion of his hand. She notices then that his gloves are also caked with blood. “Yes, okay! It’s personal. I would punch anyone who made a crack about my mother too, and I never even knew the woman. Maybe she _was_ uglier than a bantha and half as smart. I’m still not gonna let anybody say it in my hearing.”

That’s new information. A rare nugget of personal history, one of the few that he’s offered. Hera tucks it away in the back of her mind. Out loud she says: “I’m not your mother.”

“I _know_ that.” Beneath the blood, he’s grinning again. “You never even once kissed any of my boo-boos.”

She lets out a huff of frustration. “Kanan—to you this is something you can fix by punching. Make a grand gesture and—and rescue me, or impress me.” She throws out a hand. “But you’ve actually done _nothing_ for me! You get to walk into one bar and make a scene and feel great about yourself afterwards, but I still have to live with the same thing every day, on the next world and the next station and the next hundred cantinas.”

His grin fades. “I’m not trying rescue you,” he says. “Or impress you.” There’s some exasperation leaking into his voice, now. “Look, Hera. I know you can handle yourself. And when we’re on a mission, I’ll follow your lead. But on my own time, I get to make my own decisions about what shit to swallow and when. It’s not _for_ you. It’s personal.”

She doesn’t like this line of argument. Mostly because it’s superficially reasonable, and she feels like she’s starting to lose control of the issue. “It doesn’t affect you,” she scowls. “Or it shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” As banged up as his face is, his green-blue eyes are still keen and bright. “Why shouldn’t it?”

“Because—I’m not—we’re not—” _Blast_. She wasn’t ready for this; she didn’t think he’d take the conversation here. She’s not at all prepared to put definite words to the nebulous understanding that exists between them. Not even to say what it isn’t, or can’t be.

“I know that too,” Kanan cuts in. “But you can’t tell me to pretend I don’t _care_ about you. I—I played that game long enough.”

His eyes are hooded now, his face tense. Hera unfolds her arms, feeling some of her irritation draining away. “What do you mean?” she asks gently.

“I mean—” he breaks off, shaking his head. She just waits, and eventually his eyes meet hers again. “I had another partner almost ten years ago. Someone who had my back, gave me a home. Like _you_. But I ditched him.”

“Why?” she breathes. He’s said more about his past in the last five minutes than in the previous five months.

“Because it was too dangerous! For him, and for me!” There’s a rare passion in his voice, although she can hear him making an effort to control it as he continues: “And I haven’t had a real friend since. Hera, you’re—hah.” He breaks off into a rueful scoff, and she can’t tell if it’s directed at her or at himself. “You’re probably the only person in the galaxy who’s actually safer keeping company with me, and that’s because the things you get up to are actively _suicidal_. I really can’t make your life any riskier.”

“I’m careful!” she protests, and he scoffs again.

“Yeah, real careful. You wear goggles and everything when you go infiltrating Imperial facilities and blowing up moons.”

“I stopped it from blowing up!” she snaps. And he snaps right back:

“Without me you would have blown up with it!”

She opens her mouth to retort, but before she can find the words he sighs, running a hand over his hair. “Look, Hera, I’m just saying—you’re pretty important to me. So when pieces of slag talk trash about you…well, sometimes, if it doesn’t get in the way of the mission and it doesn’t put us in any danger…then I’m going to have an answer for them.”

“Written on your fists,” she says drily, and in response he grins again. His front teeth are rimmed in red.

“Yeah. They’re pretty eloquent sometimes.”

Hera reaches back for her annoyed certainty, her conviction that she’s in the right, and finds that it seems to have evaporated. Behind it there’s just that last, tender raw thing, which she still doesn’t want to look at. “Kanan,” she sighs, “I care about you too. That’s why I don’t want you to get hurt picking pointless fights on my behalf.”

“I hear you, Captain,” he says. Then he starts walking toward her—or toward the ladder behind her—and Hera instinctively moves out of his way. But he stops right by her, ducking his head down beside her cheek. She’s terribly, uncomfortable _aware_ of his nearness, and the low timbre of his voice sends a shiver across her skin as he says: “Next time I won’t get hurt.”

Then he pulls back with a last flash of that insouciant grin, and turns to the ladder, pulling himself up two rungs at a time. Hera is left standing in the cargo bay, with a racing pulse and a sense of annoyance that’s just flared back to full force.

But behind it, there’s still that last, small, tender thing. And even as Hera pulls herself onto the ladder—heading to the cockpit, heading to her quarters, heading _anywhere_ that Kanan won’t be—she can’t help but wonder. Would he _really_ do that every time?

And what if he did?

**Author's Note:**

> For an absolutely gorgeous illustration of this scene check out [Joanna Nieto's post](http://truefeels-assemble.tumblr.com/post/144817471144) on Tumblr!


End file.
